How Can I Use Student Evaluations to Improve My Teaching?

Though student evaluations of teaching are confounded by biases, research suggests well-designed and tested evaluation surveys can give you useful data that can help you improve your teaching, particularly when combined with other means of assessment.

Updated: November 2023

Scholarly Teaching

Article

From Authoring Questions to Interpreting Results

This step-by-step guide is designed to help you author questions for and glean the most useful information from your end-of-course evaluations.

Article

Making Sense and Use of Student Evaluations

While evaluations are neither perfect nor a holistic measure of teaching effectiveness, there’s still important information that can be gleaned from them. They can give you valuable insight into your course(s) to ultimately help improve your teaching—but first, you must filter out the noise.

UVA Center for Teaching Excellence

Article

Motivating Students to Give Helpful, Action-oriented Feedback

To motivate students to complete end-of-course evaluations and to provide you more useful feedback, talk with them about the importance of course evaluations and how you use their feedback.

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching

Website

What's really going on with respect to bias and teaching evals?

A recent analysis seeks to make sense of what's really going on with respect to gender and other kinds of bias and teaching evaluations. It offers suggestions for meaningful evaluations during COVID-19 and beyond.

Inside Higher Ed

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From Authoring Questions to Interpreting Results

Making Sense and Use of Student Evaluations

Motivating Students to Give Helpful, Action-oriented Feedback

What's really going on with respect to bias and teaching evals?

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